These Guys Want To Make Shipping As Easy As Snapping A Photo On Your Phone

Whether it's presents to family or products to customers, it's
almost universally acknowledged that shipping physical goods is a
huge pain.

You must either go to the post office, UPS, or FedEx to drop
something off, or deal with waiting for the truck to arrive. You
have to look through the pricing options at different carriers.
And you need to choose among different tiers of service that
don't sound all that different.

Shyp is a
startup in San Francisco that wants to change all of that. It
wants to bring the simplicity of Uber to shipping: Take a picture
of whatever you're shipping, a driver comes to pick it up, and
then Shyp handles the rest.

In only a few short months last year, what began as a Google doc
that co-founders Joshua Scott and Kevin Gibbon would pass around
to friends who needed stuff shipped transformed into a
well-planned operation with $2.1 million in funding.

Originally
conceived of as an easy way for consumers to send packages, the
team soon found that businesses were also incredibly interested
in being able to ship their wares anywhere in the world with only
minutes of notice. In a conversation with Business Insider
earlier this week, Gibbon noted that the company's transactions
have been approximately split between consumers and small
businesses in the city.

While they're currently still in a private beta, the team says that shipments
are steadily growing through word-of-mouth, and customers
continue to find new ways to use the service. One example Gibbon
gave was a user who had Shyp take care of moving out of an
apartment; rather than hiring a moving truck or boxing up his
things, the client simply had Shyp drivers pick up the stuff and
handle all of the work of getting it across the country.

Gibbon envisions a future where all kinds of businesses use the
service to handle the "first mile" of shipping: simply getting
their work out the door. Etsy users, for instance, could focus on making
their goods while letting Shyp handle all of the logistics of
getting the wares to buyers.

Here's how Shyp's service works:

Shyp users take a photo of whatever they want to ship. Since some
drivers are on bikes and others in trucks, this lets them quickly
access their capacity and whether the stuff will fit.

A Shyp driver, or "Hero," stops by in minutes to pick it
up.

The driver puts the item being shipped into a bag with a QR code
tag that lets Shyp keep track of where each item is going.

Kyle Russell/Business Insider

All of the weighing, packing, printing and boxing is handled at
Shyp's warehouse.

Kyle Russell/Business Insider

Once that's done, they also make sure that the packages get to
the correct carrier on time. Total cost to the user: the USPS
going rate, which is usually the cheapest option. Shyp makes its
money by finding the most affordable carrier that meets its
requirements and paying lower wholesale rates.